Wednesday 10 August 2016

In the midst of house buying




Welcome to the second part of this house buying set of blogs.

At the conclusion of part 1, my house hunting had taken a swerve due to the mortgage amount I could get from lenders. And I had decided that looking at the Help to Buy – Shared Ownership Scheme would be a way around this issue.

After a bit of looking around, I managed to find a 2 bed property under the Shared Ownership (SO) scheme and booked a viewing. 

It wasn’t quite the love at first sight feeling I had with the original property I had viewed a good few months before, however I was very impressed with the size, location (ish) and feel of the property. One drawback being the fact it had no lift for a 2nd floor flat, meaning my leg workout would have to step up, get it? Stairs, step up…alright I’ll get my coat!

There was an idea that once I found a place that my friend, who is currently renting, would move in and help towards the mortgage and bills. Whilst being able to save for his own place as it would be cheaper than he is currently paying. Once I had thought about this property and decided that I would be interested in going ahead I took my friend to view the property. Although there were a couple of reservations to address, he was fairly happy to live there if everything went through ok. 

So I went back to my mortgage adviser and we got the ball rolling. He was happy that the amount I was looking for would be affordable with my income and advised me to instruct the estate agent to take it off market; this is one of the more fun parts of house buying, getting to tell the estate agent that you are going ahead with the purchase and not to show anyone else around “your” house. One thing you will likely need to do when buying a Shared Ownership property is to sign up at ‘Help to Buy.com’. If you are asked to sign up, make sure you get all the information from the estate agent as to who runs the association on the property you are purchasing. All I was told was, “you need to sign up to this and give them info”, not the best direction I have been given when they are asking for all of your financial information and you’re unsure who will be viewing it! 

Everything was going in the right direction, everyone had the paperwork they needed from me and, after sitting down with the mortgage advisor for a few hours of trawling through the list of lenders until we found one that could support me with my finances, I had a mortgage illustration (this is basically a draft of a mortgage offer. It lays out the repayments, charges etc if you ended up accepting that mortgage.) 

So I was quite happy with how things were looking, until four days later. Yes just four days had passed before the first snag appeared. And when I say snag it was pretty much a derailment of the entire situation. The mortgage lender decided to change the mortgage details and offer £10,000 less than before, there are certain times that it feels like the wind has been knocked out of you and this was certainly one of them! Made slightly worse when my mortgage advisor asked if I could make it work, financial help from family; promotion at work etc. To which I kindly responded that he was not going to be getting a positive answer from me seeing as we had already stretched my finances to the limit to get the original offer in. There was never an explanation as to why the lender changed their mind on how much they could lend me either. 

That left me with the choice of:

Looking at other lenders to see if another offer could be accepted – this wasn’t overly viable as the original lender had been (I think) the 12th best option from the list of lenders. So the deals I would be looking at wouldn’t be of great benefit to me.

Or to drop the idea of getting that property.

I’m sure you can guess which option I took.

And so once again, I was back at square one and searching for a new property.
The one saving grace was that all the troubles happened before I had spent any money on solicitors’ fees or anything, so I hadn’t lost out on any money – just a bit of my sanity as things seem to be coming together only to unravel again just as quickly.

They do say that every cloud has a silver lining and there was soon to be a glimmer on the horizon of my property purchasing journey.

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